Murphy, Conor and Kettle, Anthony and Meresa, Hadush and Golian, Saeed and Bruen, Michael and O’Loughlin, Fiachra and Mellander, Per-Erik (2023) Climate Change Impacts on Irish River Flows: High Resolution Scenarios and Comparison with CORDEX and CMIP6 Ensembles. Water Resources Management, 37 (5). pp. 1841-1858. ISSN 3527-3545

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Abstract

Climate change is likely to impact water quality, resource availability and riverine ecosystems. While large ensembles are available to assess future impacts (e.g., the Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIP) and/or CORDEX) many countries have developed their own high-resolution ensembles. This poses a selection problem with robust adaptation dependent on plausible ranges of change being adequately quantified. Therefore, it is important to compare projected changes from available ensembles. Here we assess future climate change impacts for 26 Irish catchments. Using a high-resolution national ensemble of climate models projected impacts in mean, low and high flows are assessed and uncertainties in future projections related to catchment size. We then compare future impacts from CORDEX and CMIP6 ensembles for a subset of catchments. Results suggest increases in winter flows (-3.29 to 59.63%), with wide ranges of change simulated for summer (-59.18 to 31.23%), low (-49.30 to 22.37%) and food (-19.31 to 116.34%) flows across catchments under RCP8.5 by the 2080s. These changes would challenge water management without adaptation. Smaller catchments tend to show the most extreme impacts and widest ranges of change in summer, low and food flow changes. Both the ensemble mean and range of changes from the national ensemble were more modest and narrower than the CMIP6 and CORDEX ensembles, especially for summer mean and low flows, highlighting the importance of evaluating impacts across ensembles to ensure adaptation decisions are informed by plausible ranges of change.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Climate change; River flows; Hydrological model; Ensemble selection; Ireland;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units, ICARUS
Item ID:	17453
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-023-03458-4
Depositing User:	Conor Murphy
Date Deposited:	22 Aug 2023 12:19
Journal or Publication Title:	Water Resources Management
Publisher:	Springer
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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